“It was certainly implied.”

I ignore her caustic remark and continue with my attack. “You’re the one who’s gone off plan. You’ve even changed the goal.”

“I changed nothing. The goal was to make her break.”

I pause, my head tilted toward her. “You mean the test was to see if she would break. There was no goal to make her.” Studying her reaction, I realize that I’m wrong. Celia’s goal was to make Alayna break. Not to simply watch what happened.

I’m baffled by this revelation. “When did our aim become to hurt people? We were scientists, not executioners. We weren’t malicious. We didn’t set out to hurt people.”

She looks at me incredulously. “You’re so f**king clueless, Hudson. We’ve been hurting and destroying people since the game began. You always pretended like that was just an unfortunate side effect, but even pursuing an experiment that might hurt someone is malicious. It’s like performing harmful research on humans. Scientists don’t do that as a rule. You know why? It’s not just unethical; it’s against the law.”

Shaking her head, she faces forward. “I get it, Hudson, I do. You didn’t want to face how f**king cruel you really are, so you told yourself what you had to in order to live with yourself.”

She was wrong. I did know how f**king cruel I was. I knew I was an ass**le. I knew that, before Alayna, I had no heart.

But I had been a man with no comprehension of what it felt like to experience real pain. I hadn’t understood the damage I could do to people. Dr. Alberts had likened it to being a blind man asked to describe the color blue. While it didn’t excuse all my actions, it did make them less willful.

“It’s not the same at all.” We weren’t the same. All this time, I’d thought we were. “And the fact that you think so shows what a cruel bitch you really are.”

She claps her hands together with mock enthusiasm. “We’ve resorted to name-calling now, have we? How fun!” Her expression grows sober. “You can’t f**king be serious.”

“I’m dead serious, Celia. You will end this. And us…” I pause, not because the words are hard to say, but because I want to make sure she hears their emphasis. “We’re over too. I want you out of my life. Don’t call me. Don’t stop by. Do you understand?”

She sneers. For a woman so about grace and appearances, she can sure put on an ugly face. “It’s not that easy to just cut me out of your life, Hudson. Our families—”

And there’s a blessing about the recent disclosure of our baby lie. “I’m not so sure our families will be a problem after today. I’d bet our parents are not going to want to spend much time together from now on.”

The reminder of her parents and the afternoon’s revelation seems to shake her. She regroups quickly. “Well, we run in the same social circles.”

“And you will steer away from me when we show up at the same event. Do I make myself clear?”

Her nostrils fume, her eyes calculating. But she concedes with one word, “Perfectly.”

For good measure I add, “You do not want to make me your enemy.”

“Funny, I thought you’d already made me yours.”

That truth lingers in the air around us, irrefutable. She may mean I made her my enemy when I dropped out of the game with Alayna. Or when I left it three years ago and entered therapy. But I think instead it’s more accurate that she became my foe that summer ten years ago—when I decided to break her heart.

I’d told her she was suffering from karma. Wasn’t I as well?

We’ve arrived at her apartment building. The cab pulls over to the curb. “Farewell, Hudson. This is for good, I suppose. The taxi’s on you.”

She gets out of the car. I don’t watch after her.

I instruct the driver to head back to The Bowery. There’s just enough time to collect my luggage before heading to the airport for my trip to Japan. If it were only the Plexis deal at stake, I’d cancel. But there’s something else now, something more important. It’s time to act on the information that Warren Werner gave me about the vulnerabilities of his company, and that will begin with a source in Japan.

When I return, my energy will be thrown into repairing my relationship with Alayna. There’s been serious damage done on both our parts, but we can move on, I think. I have to believe that. Because without her, there’s no reason for anything else.

Though much is in turmoil about me, I feel oddly at peace as we return to my penthouse. Celia is gone from my life, and there’s a freedom with that knowledge that I hadn’t expected. Like a long-growing tumor has finally been removed. There will be a scar, I know. I’ll rub at it and scratch at phantom aches. But it’s gone, and, with Alayna, we can finally begin the process of healing.

Chapter Twenty

Before

“Why can’t I just ditch tonight after the actual rehearsal? That’s the important part, right?” Chandler had been trying for twenty straight minutes to get out of Mirabelle’s wedding rehearsal dinner.

My mother tested the temperature of the curling iron¸ her mind clearly more on her task than on her son’s complaints. “I don’t understand why you’re so eager to abandon us.”

He’s fifteen, I wanted to tell her. That was reason enough.

“Because it’s boring!” He flung his hands out, exasperated.

“Chandler!” my mother warned, covering my sister’s ears as if she might be offended by the word boring. As if blocking the sound after the fact could undo that it had been heard.

But boring…that I could agree with, even though I hadn’t been fifteen for nine years. The entire family had spent the last week of August at Mabel Shores preparing for Mirabelle’s wedding weekend. Five days of nothing but social interaction. I was close to going insane. At my sister’s insistence, I’d agreed to not bring any work. It was a mistake. With my mind unoccupied on business, my thoughts returned again and again to my other addiction—the game.

Celia and I were between schemes at the moment—part of the reason I was so eager to concoct a new one. Every guest that walked through our house that week, every visitor, was a potential subject. What could I learn from her? I’d ask myself. Or him? Or them?

Somewhere I recognized that my obsession was getting out of hand. Our experiments had grown more and more complex, more intense, more frequent. Often even my work hours were infiltrated with daydreaming about the next project, the next scam. The week away had made me realize just exactly how consumed I’d become. I felt like a junkie who hadn’t scored in a while—jittery, agitated. On edge.